 So welcome so much for this session. Two hours, DHS2 for Education. This is the third time we're presenting DHS2 for Education at this annual conference, two times digital, hopefully next time, very physical. And that says something, how long we have been working on this, actually. And many countries now, you see the country names there. We will hear stories from most of them, not all, not all go and was something, but the other countries will tell and share experiences, hint and tips, and various practices. So I'm really, so I'm trying not to switch. OK, so DHS2, this annual conference is all about health, not all about health. It's about logistics. It's a lot about water and sanitation and nutrition as well, but a very big area here is actually education, this session, where we during the last year have been reusing software feature, reusing the IT capacity in the country, in the region, and leverage the global community. And this time we really would like to see also share some experiences, not only education and health we have heard about many days now, but also cross sector, how can we cross-fertilize health and education, COVID surveillance, and so forth. So that is what we will do this today. And we are encouraging all of you, and I think Sophia already posted in the chat, all of you to enter into this DHS2 community or practice, the COP, we call it, because this time we really want to keep in contact with you guys that are interested in education. We will, you will be able to communicate to the presenters after you will see all the presentations there and hopefully we can create some activity. And we will also announce various activities like we are planning to have an own education in the DHS2 for Education Academy in the Gambia, physically, and we will post those kind of news there. So check it out. So this again, agenda, two hours, bear with us, it's pretty packed, but super interesting. So we will have an opening with our friend, Alphaba, we will present introducing to set. Then we will have stories from the Ministry of Education in Uganda, in Eswatini, in Gambia, and then Sri Lanka, and then the cross-sector. And we will end the whole show with a panel where we will discuss future collaboration on scaling financing with Adea and the GPE people global partnership for education, RTI International and UNESCO. So I hope, please stay on. I think it will be super interesting. So the first to open the whole thing, which Alpha actually did two years ago as well, not now, it's three years. The first time he presented physically in Oslo, Alpha was presenting the new shift, but now it's new shift to action. Alpha by head of MS and ICT unit, Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education from the Gambia, close friend, being working with us on formulating the agenda for the DSSU for education. So over to you, Alpha. Thank you, Christine, for that very good introduction. I hope you are hearing me. We can hear you well. Okay, I apologize for not putting my video on because of the fear of losing my internet connection. So just to continue where you stop, thank you very much. My name is Alpha by head of the MS and ICT units under the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education. We are very happy to be part of this collaboration and joining for improving the data system in the Gambia and as well as the region and beyond. Our presentation this time would be looking at from the new shift, like new image shift to action. And this slide is showing you a banner that we had launched the individual student system at the national level as you could see the partners that supported it. And then the table shows here that our permanent secretary, directors and senior management, including the Gambia Bureau of Statistics and Ministry of Education who witnessed this ceremony. Next slide. Do I control my, okay. The outline of my presentation we'll be looking at the actual education management information shift, why we are calling it a shift in the Gambia and the launching of the shift. What did we do? How did we manage from the concept stone from the senior management up to the local level? What are the challenges? What are the issues we are facing with and what are the enabling environment and how we are, what we have learned. Remember I want to remind everyone that the shift is underpinned by the DHR S2 platform. So the lesson we have learned there and our next steps. So the slide you are seeing is one of the, the picture you are seeing here is one of the local level sharing of the image shift. Next slide. Now before the image shift in the Gambia we had always had image processes that are handled at the planning directorate even within the education sector, education ministry, we have two ministries. The people who know image and data are concentrated around the planning directorate. Although we had some regional officers and close officers, but when it comes to data and data use you must deal with one of these people and anything has to do around those people, planning people. Now that was the challenge, that was the before the shift. And the involvement of our stakeholders at the school level we are limited to just completing the questionnaire and inserting the data they are filling in the paper questionnaire is valid. So that's how involved they were. But with all that, we were able to publish a yearbook, a statistical yearbook every May, that was that we collected in November, processed it and by May of the year we are able to publish it so that we are having data, aggregate data that can be used to inform the reforms during the academic year. Now data was aggregate and the focus was only around participation and access. How many schools? How many boys and girls are coming to school? How many, what is the proportion of their coming are they coming at the right age? How many teachers do you have? What are the class size? What are the other facilities in terms of do you have schools with electricity? Do you have school with fence and security? Or do you have school with water? So that's where the kind of data we have. When it comes to all the data that make it add value in terms of exam data that was missing. So this was a challenge we had. And as a result of it, before the Amis safe, before we started looking beyond this, we had been asked data, we had had a serious data gap. GPE will tell you that we are reporting nine indicators out of the 12 GP indicator that was not even included in the SDG for indicator that was more wider. Next slide. Then we had to, we had to because to respond to these challenges we needed learning data. In every year we had national assessment data for example, grade three, nine year olds and grade five and grade eight. Exam data will show that the average score for all these grade three, nearly half of them may not able to get good grades. So we had been, we did, our Amis was not able to inform that. So how do we align our current data system and Amis system with the current policy? The policy is saying, let's look at quality education. But the challenge of our data don't have good data around quality. Let's look at equity. Again, our data was not measured in the equity challenge. The inclusion challenge, particular spatial need, the data we had was a challenge. So we did, how about service delivery indicator? So you access questions around this. Our Amis system was almost not responsive, not comprehensively responsive. And then so we said, what the best option would be to look at the, to save the data from aggregate to individual learner. So that way we are able to respond to the equity challenge inclusion and quality challenge. And including the service delivery indicators that are related to learning. So these were some of the reasons why we had to save to individual learner. Next slide. Now, with the safe now, luckily the good news was we had been working with the UIO and the, and HIPPS West Africa and DHS. And then we were able to pilot this and then we were able to have an idea of what to do. Because you cannot just wake up overnight and a whole education system, a group of planning officers in the planning department just to save the whole system. We needed to accompany with people who have no distance and who knows data system and who have a very good research behind it. And luckily we had the DHS. And then what the challenge now is testing it, we tested it and we were very happy with the test. And then we now move to the safe. So you could see the photo here, the, for every cluster at the school level, at the local level, our team went to explain to the stakeholders, headteachers and teachers about why we are accepting and explaining the questionnaire. So the picture you saw there, the permanent safety, the opening statement he made on television during the launching of the day, that video was started with the team that went round to the study field. So for every meeting we had, we had to go with a projector, we had to find a television or some form of audio visual. So that the permanent safety statement would be played on the TV because not every community has electricity and the national TV during the launching was not made available to everyone. So this is one of the strategy we used to bring people. Look, this is not only me and CD and DHS people trying to tell you, but that you hear what the government, the CEO of the ministry is saying this, you heard it. So that was one of the strategy used. But then when it come to again, we had been inundated with so many because we are aware of this that safety data from school level aggregate to individual will come up with new challenges. And then including the following, we have to develop a new student learner profile, a new questionnaire, a social economic component of the questionnaire. And then we have to have an inclusive education screening tool, which means for special needs children, anybody who was suspected at the time, we have to give a special questionnaire to assess whether you have, what are the challenges, because in the past, our image we were asking only physical, who is, how many children are physically disabled or differently able. But now we are looking at what are the issues around you so that we can keep it. And then we have to work with our stakeholders. All our stakeholders, the relationship we are doing with them has increased. For example, the parent, we needed to inform them why are we asking for their background information such as do they have electricity at home? Have they been to school as a parent? We need to explain to them why are we asking that. And then for our exam council, we used to only work with exam council, maybe once every exam results are out, but now we need to mention from the entry of exam, when a child is entering exam, writing the exam, all the way process, we need to participate in the process. Now when it comes to the curriculum, we've never had data on curriculum. We need to work with our curriculum department and then sit with them and find out what are the curriculum that I mentioned that we are going to improve. And similarly, our Gambia Bureau of Statistics, we needed to get more data on the projection to help us. So these are some of the big new challenges we have faced, but we are happily addressing them step by step. Next slide. Then what needs to be done? But one of the challenges we face in this process is that we are doing this in an environment where even our Education Act has limitation. There was, if you look at the Education Act that says that school should give data to the head office, to the minister whenever COC asks for the data. It is not elaborate. It is just a one statement saying that every year, the minister should give data to the planning unit for policy analysis, administrative data. We now need to ensure that there are policy environment that ensures that the data now go beyond just that kind of statement. So we're looking at, how about the budget? The budget for local government has always almost been offered. There's not much support. So we need to ensure that we have a very good advocacy approach with our partners so that the minister of finance will continue giving us more funding to sustain EMIS. And even for the African Union, Equus, there is a subregion in Africa here. We had what we call EMIS norms and standard. If you look at the norms and standard for EMIS right now, it's almost like the Education Act. They have not addressed the challenges around individual data. So these are some of the things that at local level, we need to revisit our policies and enabling environment. At the regional level also, particularly at the African Union and Equus, who are driving and helping African countries, we need to start having norms and standard policies around EMIS that are really very addressing for the issues of individual data and learner focus. So these are some of the things that we need to ensure that most stakeholders engagement need to be done. Next slide. Now, what have we learned? What is one of the things that is really motivating the Gambia journey on this is the fact that DHS had worked for us when we had the pilot phase. And most of the EMIS domains were tested with the domain such as data collection, data processing, data analysis were posted. We had the new instrument we collected. There was this fear that we are going too far, but luckily the people we had at the school level were very responsive and they adopted it. We had a new screening tool which also worked. We have already collected it. The most important part was the unique ID for learners because we are talking about ID for individual learner. How do you create it in the context of electricity challenge in the context of data system challenge? How do you answer that the ID you create in region six will not be duplicated with the ID in region five or in region one in combo in the urban area? So, but luckily we had a spot from DHS support who visited our team from West Africa and then we were able to have a solution where you can create a student register number at an offline base and it will never, the probability of it being duplicated with another number is very slim. That was a big achievement we had. Now, we had EMIS focal point. Again, this is another important part that is very important because of this lesson learned. Like I, when I started, I said that we had very few planners who were working on EMIS. With the DHS pilot, we had 200 focal point at this during the pilot. Now, when we go round, we went with these people. We are now beginning to have one individual focal point for EMIS, even moving from our close up monitor and our original focal point. We are now having more people on EMIS. So we are able to, the data is able to sync from the school level to the national database. We are able to cater for new needs in terms of development. We have a school app for the DHS platform. My colleague would later in this session would report on these things and we already digitized our school report card. But next slide. The next step is to how do we continue building capacity for this? Because now that we are having all these people, like the example idea was 200 EMIS focal point. We are assuming that we're going to have every school will have a data guide. Not a new person coming in, but one of the teachers. It could be the head teacher. It could be his assistant. It could be a designated teacher. Who would be dealing with data at the school level? Because the school need to be empowered to ensure that the data that is generating is being used at the school before the minister or the planning director ask for it. If you have to have that, we need capacity building. And this is why we are working with HIF and DHS2 team to ensure that we are able to bring our EMIS services being discussed at the tertiary and high institution in the Damian. So that we will not be, when a teacher, let's say a teacher in the college might have an awareness of data handling before he graduate as a teacher or at the university or specifically a special person going to be trained as a data guide. So that when he or she is looking for job, he will just jump into the system as an apprentice. Two minutes left, sir, Alpha. Next slide. I think that's my, that's the end of this slide. Thank you very much for your kind attention. Fantastic. And please, there is possibilities to post question in the, both in the chat and in the COP. And then we can address it later. So we need to go to the next presentation already. And I will call up Dr. Mugini from, he's a commissioner for basic education and in ministry of educational sport from Uganda. So welcome Dr. Mugini. Over. Are you there? This is Ugandan, Dean Mugini. Good. Good afternoon district, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Klofer Mugini, commissioner of basic education, minister of education and sports Uganda. We are happy to share with you the DS2 in education experience in Uganda. In this presentation, we are basically the focus of implementing DS2 in education. Three lessons learned and then they were forward. Next slide, please. We are implementing DS2 for education in terms of this. I think we are losing your voice. Is it only me or is it others as well? No, I'm also losing the voice. Here we go. That is Gulu Akiso. We have developed the central repository for learning institutions master list. And this has been a very essential in helping us to play a key role in the national COVID-19 response data collection from 140 districts in Uganda. We have been able to collect data from 45,000 primary schools and also data on enrollment, special needs as facilities to be able to address the effects of COVID-19. And as I talk, we are going back to the COVID-19 school base surveillance in the four part of districts and we hope to scare this one to all schools across the country. Next slide, please. DS2 in education has been able to help us to improve data presentation both at the national and local level. When you go to schools, you find the information displayed on the district of North sports and at the midst of educational sports we are using smart screens which is a very big achievement. We have also a case of teams on data management through the best practices for data management. We have improved the use of data district level through planning and budgeting as well as resource allocation in terms of infrastructure development and allocation of resources. As you can see the in the photos besides this PowerPoint in the PowerPoint presentation we you can see photos showing how the data is being processed, the trainings where the district education teams being trained or not, data management and then the improved use of data district level through submission of reports to the various stakeholders. Next, please. Because education works in the partnership with other sectors, we use the data to reform the implementation of various programs. For example, immunization of school children against... We lost you there. Yeah, I'm not hearing anything. I'm Dr. Cleo for school. MISO is a better and as a national process to seek for additional resources from partners and of course it was very, very important for us to conduct School Coffee 19 surveillance and reporting where the schools would be able to send the data to the district and this is how we're going to get it and shared with the national team. And the data has also been used to inform teachers of the COVID-19 vaccination so that they are able to be vaccinated to avoid affecting the learners. Next slide, please. At the Ministry of Education headquarters, we have trained the staff in the DHS2 for education, basically or no basic design and supported the harmonization of different Ministry of Education department on their reporting needs, data analysis and the presentations using the DHS2 analytical tools. This has also, the program has also helped us to facilitate communication and information sharing across the district departments and the Ministry of Education as well as partners through sharing of the wireless internet beyond the offices of education and sports department as well as online support, supervision and experience. As you can see in the photos, the first photo is showing the team of the Ministry of Education that participated in the training of the designer and the customization. Then as well as you can see on the extreme right, the photo of what's up, we are people of online support, supervision and experience sharing. Next slide, please. In terms of development, we have laptops and internet connection to the piloted districts. We have also provided storage facilities for proper storage of hard copies and their printers so that people are able to print copies and share as well as print out questionnaires for data collection. The other very important... We lost you there sound-wise. That benefit has been the harmonization of pattern and the Ministry of Education we have taken issues of GMDM special needs using a tool, the extreme right, we have come up with standard tools to avoid duplication in reporting. Ladies and gentlemen, the lessons that we have learned, senior and top management buying and support is very critical in terms of implementing this program and scaling it up. Uganda has not yet developed an EMS policy, the development of this policy is ongoing and this policy will help to enforce reporting and provide guidance for data collection and management. But it is important that we have dedicated education data management at district level for sustainable implementation and we have realized that decentralization of education data management improves the data utilization at the lower levels starting at the school and the sub-national level. Next. We have been able to integrate data collection reporting needs for both partners, the district and the Ministry of Education and the sports, here's minimizing duplication and the waste of resources. And as you all know that DSH2 is an open source system with a commitment of experts, this reduces implementation costs and has also promoted sustainability. And a couple of senior officers such as the district, the health management information, the focal person and the DSH2 education champions are being utilized to be the capacity for education teams and scaling up HS2 where we realize that the capacity of some officers is inadequate. We can be able to grow from this pool of experts to be able to support them. And this implies that there is a linkage between the education and the health data that is critical for implementation of health programs and the responses to emergencies as I've already mentioned, for example using this data to address the issues of COVID-19 pandemic. Next. What is the work forward? In terms of the work forward, we shall continue to build the capacity of the minister of education team to configure the system and be able to maintain the system in terms of server management and coordination with other stakeholders. The routine data collection using the family data collection tools will continue and this of course we feed into the research and documentation of DSH2 for education in terms of identifying the best practice and the strategies for adoption to further enhance the quality of teaching and learning. Data sharing and feedback to the sub-national school and community level is something that is very critical and which we need to strengthen. And of course as I said cross-sector linkages in terms of our restrictions. How is the system integrated with the teacher information management system, the various examination boards as well as the management information system. We shall continue to engage with partners for scale up and serve the student international program and the UNICEF. And since we the policy on MS is still under development and they are sure that the ingredients for education are included in the ministry and the district's strategic plans and the budgeting. Ladies and gentlemen would like to acknowledge the support and appreciate the minister of education and the sports especially the basic education department, save the children in the University of Oslo, Norad Kix and the global partnership for education. Without their support we would not have achieved these benefits and also learned the lessons that we have been able to learn and planning in Uganda. Thank you. Thank you so much. This has been a very interesting story from the EMS work in Uganda with a DMS it's called there is already glamorous examples of cross sector collaboration and then the next presentation is from Eswatini. Do we have anyone from Eswatini online? Over. I think I can always say Victor here. Victor do you have anyone else from Eswatini? Yes we are all here the team is here and I will present on behalf of Eswatini. Be welcome. So you have 10 minutes. I think we are appearing as minister of education. I will grant co-host just a moment. There we go. You can now unmute yourself. So please. Good afternoon everyone. Hello. Hello we can hear you. We can hear you. Thank you. This is Namini from Eswatini. I will be doing the presentation not Mr. because he is away for now. So for us can we move to the presentation for the Eswatini. We have the rationale for Eswatini. Why we are transitioning from the current system into the HIs to the current site of Eswatini what we are doing right now and looking at the gaps and the opportunities that we are going to get from the system and then we are going to talk about the progress made so far. Next slide. Okay. For us as I am speaking right now we have a report for 2018 as a country for the education sector which is a bit old and not updated. So due to the challenges as a country the ministry saw it fit with the support of the UNICEF to do an assessment of the unit to see where we are falling behind and what can be done and several recommendations were made that we either move to a blended system based on web based or we just completely move to a web based system or we improve on the current system and another reason why we are transitioning is because with the current system due to lack of training for our staff in development systems we couldn't add indicators from international agendas or the local agendas so that was part of the reason why we needed to develop a new system to include that. Also we did a study to learn from neighboring countries on what we can do after a long process of consultations the ministry then decided with the support of UNICEF to engage the University of Oslo through the Ugandan team to develop the system for us. Next slide. This slide is telling us about what is currently happening right now in our unit. The system is still paper based meaning that we as a country are still printing out hard questionnaires and then they are distributing them to the regions in the country. We distribute that the questionnaires to the regions then the head teachers have to travel from their school to their original offices to collect those forms fill them in, after filling them in they have to return them to the headquarters or to the original offices whereby the MS officers have to collect that information punch it that is when we process with punching in the data there are always gaps when we are dealing with data so we have to make follow-ups through phone calls or going to the schools and then we do follow-ups to the schools that have a different submitted those questionnaires which you could imagine takes time after that when all is done then we start making the tables the basic tables that are preset in the system then we do the trends and then we write the report and disseminate that information which takes about eight months if we are first and if schools are cooperating with us. Next slide. So what are we currently collecting from the schools we are collecting the school data by the demographic is in the questionnaires but also collecting student data and that one is not there is no personal identification number for the learners that are collecting the data we only use serial numbers which they change every year that's why we collect the data we collect the data and punch in the same information year in year out then we have staff data again which is according to the serial numbers of the teachers and which is not uniform such that you can know that series number one was teachers or and so you have to repunch that information again year in and year out we collect school infrastructure and facilities data one is available on the school teaching and learning material and finance expenditure data also we get the population information from the Central Statistical Office to make our our indicators. Next slide please. So having said everything that is happening currently and looking at what the the GIS2 system is promising to have for us we are looking at that if as we know that there are standards when you collect information and report on information so we have to abide by the standards and when we are looking at what is currently happening right now using the relevance like I said that there are agendas that are being approved that have to be implemented the progress that have to be implemented that means we have to monitor them and it is difficult doing that due to the preset standard of the system and the lack of training for our staff to act those new indicators, new data elements so with the new system we are hoping that it will be easy to capture if there is a once off survey to capture that survey to monitor any new program that is being implemented in the country we need to redefine and research values for the indicators that need to be reported and also the online training for the GIS is also of great purpose you can follow that and see where you need to make changes in the system and then for the accuracy when you look at the fact that you need to report on something that we have entered that given time the system will help with that with the new definitions and new methodologies of reporting on that indicator timeliness which is our huge problem and the reason mostly behind the reason for updating or upgrading our system is because like I said 2018 data plan has can't even reference that anymore yet with this new system it's promising that it will be real time reporting tool next slide please and then the accessibility with the current system with the current system with the current system or with the accessibility to only one IT person can enter the system and do the timeliness tables that is needed by the users yet with the new system it's promising that with the dashboard you can just put you know that these are the indicators that are mostly used and you can simply put it there then information can be easily interpreted in the dashboard which is friendly next slide please Russian through so what have we done so far with the team with the Ugandan team they have developed a school based system that will be entered at the school level they have developed a tracking tool for teachers and learners they have developed a question is which rotates around the assessment tool for inspectors for inspectors MLE tool for the HIV AIDS indicators in the country and your education sensors they have done that next slide next slide please they have trained us on the system and the team has also been trained on the fundamental of the HIIs tool online they have trained on that and what is pending currently is the piloting of the system into the schools whereby we have chosen to be piloted which is Manzini and he had small schools and the number of learners are high next slide then next about us okay okay for this one what we are taking away right off the benefit for the system is that we have been able to get a buying from the inspectors and the schools to use the system as this will just prompt if it were to government and to the policymakers that schools are and so needs this and there will be a great impact to the delivery of education and then through the assessment tool for inspectors we will use that to validate and audit our data that the headteachers are filling in the presentation of maps and chart and graph that is also awesome as it will make it easier and statistically friendlier to users who are not so very much into that and then the tracking of learners using the personal identification number it's a high light that we think as a country will benefit very much so the next few slides they show what has run you into the into the community world which just shows the excitement we have into that, thank you so much thank you so much this is super interesting I'm so sorry that we are a little bit short on time but you really wanted to hear all the stories and I really encourage everyone, you will be able to look at the slides of the COP, the community of practice, you will get them and then you can also be in dialogue with the people that present it so then I will call up on CD I guess it's CD first that will start to talk a little bit of the data used in the Gambia on this M shift yes, thank you very much hello everyone my name is CD Ahmed Dhalo I work with the MS unit of the MS of Secondary Education in the Gambia I am also a PhD candidate at UIO studying the plan shift of data system from aggregate to individual level as alpha has touched on earlier in the session I will be co-presenting with my partner Jeri Azewawa from US and Central Africa we will be discussing the following points as you see in the overview as to how has helped elevate the standing of MS data how it supported the registration of students in public schools nationwide and feeling a data need how it increased the accessibility and the reach of the attendance system and the school report back we will then talk about some challenges we encountered along the way and other data use approaches planned in the coming months since from inception of the DHISO MS project in the Gambia HIPS-UIO Central Africa had improved a lot of programs in which our ministry as a body has realized a lot of benefits from beginning from the customization of the soon to be defined aggregates MS sensors formed HIPS-UIO Central Africa facilitated the core MS team on the different features and capabilities of the DHISO platform the outcome of this customization session became the container in which our legacy MS data is housed this is important for two reasons one, it created a sort of hybrid system as we transition from aggregated individual level data system thereby providing continuity which is super important throughout the history of systems development in MS this is the first time legacy data have been incorporated as part of a new system if you look at our commerce current MS system it has data until around 2010 when it was redesigned but if you ask around someone will tell you that they have 1997 MS data lying around in their computers which only they can access two, it puts MS data under a brighter spotlight therefore multiplying its visibility MS provides DHISO provides a dynamic configurable stage which increases the activity of MS data MS data before this is only published as a static PDF document filled with statistical tables which admittedly is difficult to navigate for those outside the statisticians and the planner groups now there's a possibility to simplify the message customize it and contextualize it to fit the needs of the different user groups the only thing that is left to do is to train the user group on leveraging this new found accessibility and place their data demands and place their data demands in their own hands to satisfy and we have a plan with respect to the kicks project next slide please also as Alpha has touched on earlier the shift entails the transfer of 4 MS functions from the ministry to the school and the activity slants function in the school if they are acting up by far is admission and registration of students at the beginning of the school year and therefore no better place to start the transition to individual level system the DHISO project in the Gambia successfully piloted the individual student admission and registration component of the shift in 200 schools using schools however the national rollout is brought by the absence of much needed infrastructure at the level of the schools which are yet to be placed so we leverage the existing resources from the pilot collect and register students on the platform this marked the launching of individual student MS system as we have seen in the pictures and once registered the students are assigned a unique identification number this registration of individual students provides the ministry with much needed data now it is very possible to analyze the results beyond visual teams and analyzed by democratic parameters for example, parents education background which will become useful as the ministry is now pushing for learning in the home as a pathway to improve the performance of students. Special needs also has the world's attention at the moment as evident in the SDGs and other international agendas the ministry has in the last couple of months upgraded special needs from a unit to a department in line with the global agendas to respond to special needs issues in the education sector the MS data will now be able to provide that department with not only numbers but also the the national class, unas sixty-five sorry we don't hear you now city and their localities targeted interacting moment. I think we might have lost city altogether no no no I just take a little so. Okay, I'm You're back. You're back. That's good. Yes. So let me just sort my screen out. Okay. Now the daily attendance system in the form of SMS starting in 2009 as before the attendance data of teachers and students in the schools was only available at the end of each time. The MS SMS in 2009 app installed. Okay. Are you are you getting? We can hear you now and then. Okay. Okay. So the app still the app still sends the data by SMS but takes care of the format in itself and is also in build it has been built analyzer that allows schools to visualize their own data. The team also designed dashboard analysis tools in the form of platform which allowed us to quickly extract reports of responses, responses from schools and attendance data from teachers and students and send them to regional offices. The ministry has supplied devices to the cluster monitor who are officers under the regions to monitor attendance. Now all that's left is to train them on data as to and how to access it on their own and generate reports when and where they wish. So this is an example of generating reporting rates on the left and attendance rates monitoring on the right. Next screen. Yes. This is an example of example of reporting rates monitoring on the left and attendance rates monitoring on the right. So next slide. So the school report card is an important outcome of MS as a feedback to schools and communities except tool to run schools based on efficiency by picking resources at disposal of schools against performances of students in exams but internal external examinations. It is good example of the potential of integrated data system like links, MS data, example endowment and their qualification teaching and learning resources with examination data and demographic data like the well and poverty index of the locality of the schools. The school report card is also driving data use at the level of the schools as without it the schools wouldn't be able to prepare their school improvement plans as the school report card determines the priority areas they need to plan for in the coming year and consequently without the school improvement plan there will be no school improvement grant from the government. The school report card has wide reading audience from politicians you can read as you know 100 minutes of education to planners, regional officers, head, teachers, parents, community leaders. The graph on the right shows the simplified school report card which is sent to the communities. The school report card was based on Microsoft Excel which means we have to manually bring data from resources mentioned above and link them which is not always easy and required many hours of effort. Next slide. The school report card is now digitized with the help from UIO master students and Heapson Central America. Now the app is available on our DHISO instance and accessible to all teachers who have already created who we have already created accounts on the platform whereas it was the ministry that prints and distribute the school report cards to schools. Now the schools can access and print whenever they want. In addition the digitization allows the schools to access and print the previous four cards and use them in meetings with the communities to compare and determine whether the schools were improving or otherwise. The ministry could only print latest school report card because of course related issues. Now the digitization also reduced the time and effort invested in the development of the school report card as the linking and many calculations will now be handled by the system. It also provides the potential to add value to school report card with new features and easily adjust some areas as per the feedback received from the testing of the digitized school report card with teachers, custom windows and regional digitization. So I would stop here and allow my colleague Jerry to continue on the other data use approaches we plan on impacting in the coming months. Thank you. Thank you CD. Welcome Jerry from Heapson Central Africa. Well, good. Thanks Christy. So what we're trying to do now is to actually bring data to the community because we already have the system, we have the data, aggregate data and we now actually plan to do to do a capture individual data but this data needs to be sent to the stakeholders. So we're actually developing dashboards for the various stakeholders that we already identify. So we are going to work on what is needed, what are the information needs that are relevant to them and then we're going to bring out those dashboards or outputs that they can use actually. So this is one thing we are going to do and the second thing that we actually are planning to do is mainly to bring the data to a lower level. So what happens most of the time is that we have for example the school report card that is actually an example of bringing the data to the lower level and we also want to bring that data further to the lower level. We also wanted to bring it to regional officers, to cluster monitors. So we are actually developing going to develop standard reports, other type of reports that we can actually print out and actually send it to the lower level. So we want this data to be accessible by any means. We are also thinking of actually building a platform for example and that platform could actually be accessed by students, parents and teachers where we could have some relevant information for them. And we are also thinking of sending this information to like permanent secretary, the ministry because what we think is that if they could have like a monthly quarterly report sent to them via email or other means that would be very interesting they don't possibly need to have access to GHS too for those information. We are bringing the information to them using the common channels that they actually use to work. So talking about SMS, we're talking about emails etc etc. So those are the things that we are actually planning to do in the coming months. Next slide please. So one of the challenges that we have when trying to implement all these is first of all we actually have enrolled, I mean we have deployed and actually distributed 200 Chromebooks and also 800 tablets and we have issues with device management or challenges with device management. And one of them I can talk about is actually like updating the system because when you have an Android system you probably need to update it to the latest versions. And doing that since we don't have a fully flagged MDM we had to do it manually or actually tell them to come to the original office to actually have those updates. So some of the updates that we had along the line because we're using Android, the Android app of GHS too, we needed to actually make sure they were upgraded into the system. That was a bit challenging for us. One of the things that we also have was related to infrastructure because I mean in some places you don't have any electricity all the time and entering that data it requires electricity at some point. If you even have laptops or Chromebooks you need to charge that. You need to have internet and so in some regions we didn't have internet. So we are actually working in finding ways to actually make sure that those data are into the system but we all have those challenges related to infrastructure. One of them also that we have is actually due to what the picture that we have in Android versus the picture that we have in the web. And some of the features in the web are not available in Android or sometimes they are limited. And the thing is also we actually were using the previous version of Android app and now some of the things have changed. So there's a need to actually upgrade that but there's sometimes slight differences between both of them and we sometimes discover that on the field those are one of the things that we have the challenges. Now when we talk about the school report card when we are building it we realize that some of the indicators that we needed to build like some indicators where I needed to be actually indicators with previous periods and current periods and that wasn't possible in the GHS version that we used and there are other types of calculation that we could not do in GHS. So it was building the application itself, the school report card itself and we are trying to make sure that it's more flexible. So we're going to add more features to the school report card so that we can have this configuration done manually by users because school report card demands a lot of calculation and we need to make it much more flexible. Right now it's actually hard coded. Now there's also very sorry only two minutes left. Okay great so we also talk about this thing that we realized is that when we have this school report card when trying to implement it we realize that it actually didn't meet all the information needs of the lower level so there's a need to actually work with the lower level to see what are the information needs and what do we need to actually implement or add into the school report card. So it's really important to actually have a back and forth communication before trying to update the school report card because there is a plan to upgrade the school report card. There's also one thing that we had was actually the language barrier because two is actually sent at the community level and what happens is that most of the discussion are done in local languages so there was like sometimes they realized with this one it has an English version and they really wanted to have another type of local language that we use to actually communicate the information to the community so there is a need to actually find a way to make sure that this system is actually digested at the local level by probably finding a way to translate the information or trying to find a way of making sure that the local or the community understands the data and that language will not be a barrier. I think next slide please. So I think that's all for us. Thank you very much. Thank you Jerry. We have many some questions in the chat but we will end the country stories by hearing from Sri Lankan context and Pamud will share your slides. You try at least and if not I stop here and then take over. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening everyone. I'm Pamud Damodakorn from History Lanka and I'll be representing with Dr Madhura Mahalap from she's the additional secretary from Ministry of Education Sri Lanka and today we will discuss about learnings from health and adapting to education. So a little bit of background about DHS2 we use in our health sector. We started off in year 2012 and one unique situation in Sri Lanka's DHS implementation was it was mainly evolving around the master's program in biomedical informatics which is at University of Kalambu. So basically what happens is Ministry of Health they provide paid leave for medical doctors to get specialty trained in health informatics and they once they complete the course they are reverted back to the ministry and they are the key people who are in charge of implementing systems at national and district level. So basically most of our DHS2 instances were evolved around them. They did the capacity building and they kind of were in charge of driving the implementation forward. So we have some DHS2 instances which have evolved across many DHS2 versions like we started off around like DHS2 2.10 something like that and one issue that we have is like we have more than 20 DHS2 instances in Sri Lanka which kind of like owned by many vertical programs within the Ministry of Health. So we have some advanced implementations so we use Prankar aggregate and even as you can see here we have mobile-based implementations in health sector of Sri Lanka. So as you can see here this is how our number of implementations have grown in the health sector. So we have we see a rapid increase of our implementations in 2017, 2018 and 2019. But of course it was with few challenges as well. One thing is we had this unique situation of having these master's students specially trained medical doctors in health informatics. So these were kind of like mostly self-driven implementations and owned by the vertical programs or units within the Ministry of Health. So with that we had some kind of fragmentation of DHS2 instances and we are now facing challenges of integrating how I mean the data of different amongst different implementations that we have and also capacity building. The thing is like it really depends on the force of the particular key implementer the health informatics doctor who's working in each of these departments. So these were a few key challenges that we encountered in our health sector implementations. So with that of course we focused our attention on Ministry of Education. So we are very new to this on DHS2 industry in Sri Lanka. We started off just a couple of months back in 2021. So a few positives is that the Ministry of Education has established paper-based information system from schools to be all the way up to the national level. The frequency of reporting is somewhat less compared to health which has like monthly sometimes daily reporting from field to national. And of course there is less fragmentation in administration as well as implementations compared to what we have in health sector. And there have been several attempts of implementing information systems. Few custom ones as well as open source ones such as open abyss. And they have very good ICT and education domain expertise especially in the Ministry as well as at provincial level. And one key thing is that they have a very good resources and capacity at provincial level which can really drive implementations as per our opinion. And especially the national schools we have quite many of them. They have very good ICT infrastructure from which we can start implementations. So our approach we were concentrating mainly on a few of the lessons that we learned from health sector and we tried to take it from them. So our approach was that we provided advocacy and also we reached the higher administration of Ministry of Education and highlighted the importance of DHS2 and how it has been used in other countries for amines domain. And to build the core capacity within the Ministry of Education so that they can sustain their own implementations then depending on outside party because like based on previous experience this has been identified as one major issue the capacity within the Ministry of Education in sustaining their implementations. And of course like a thing is there are too many requirements like requirements never change and we are all too ambitious. That's the same thing that happens in health as well. But the focus was we will identify a few use cases, few scenarios we can implement DHS2 and we start small and we can definitely scale it up with regard to the number of like the institutes or schools using the system as well as number of data and reforms or the components that we are deploying DHS2 to capture data. And then of course the other most important thing is to provide the dashboards and also if there are existing information flows to integrate them so that we can be able to produce some meaningful information to make decisions like dashboards. And the thing is like for example there are definitely infrastructure issues as well but the thing is like we were planning to get support from the provinces as well as initially have some implementations going in the national schools where we have good infrastructure so that we can really test whether this is going to work out in Sri Lanka or not. So of course what we started off as of now one major step on capacity building is to organize the in-country DHS2 academy for education. So we had experience in organizing DHS2 academies in health rather than rather DHS2 academies in general but this one was very specific to the health. So the objective was to build advocacy capacity building within the Ministry of Education. So the contents of course I mean contents like the areas that we were going to cover in this academy was decided by collaboration of his as well as the Ministry of Education. So this was kind of attended by the administrative staff, the education domain experts as well as the core team in Ministry of Education. And the one key difference was that this was spanned across several days like we are planning to have like this for like six days or more. The thing is like we are not going to have it at a stretch so we will have now we have already concluded two days of the academy which was kind of held two weeks apart. So the content is like the final objective of this academy is like we will sit with the Ministry of Education team and they will build the capacity so that they become confident in customizing as well as managing their own instances. At the same time we try to make them aware about DHS2 concepts so that they can apply them again when they are trying to scale it up. So we cover the lessons that we have learned from health sector and also some very technical things like how to manage their own DHS2 instance, how to customize and also we will have a major focus on analyzing data so that they'll be capable enough to create visualizations within DHS2 and also to produce their own dashboards and as well as that and also to make them aware on how to conduct training programs because like we are planning to build a team of trainers who will be conducting the training programs at provincial level as well as individual schools. So this is what we have done in the education sector so far. We have done very little as of now but we are planning to do more. We have just been operational like almost two to three months. So I would now like to invite Dr. Madhura Mahal from the additional secretary from Ministry of Education to take it from there and to express our audience the plans the Ministry of Education has. Over to you Dr. Madhura. Yes, thank you Dr. Pramod and also thank you for the invitation for the DHS2 team. I am giving here a very brief overview about the education sector. Here we are actually serving the education for the children of age 5 plus to 18 plus and we have around 4.2 million children scattered around 10,155 schools which are actually located in very you know regional areas as well as well as in the cities so country widespread schools and we have about 240,000 teachers and also these are supported by a range of regional educational institutions, the teacher education institutions, national colleges of education, regional regional English support centers and ICT resource centers as well. The ICT resource centers also have around we have around more than 100 ICT centers scattered throughout the country and they are actually somewhat I would say well equipped in order to support the schools as well and also the teacher training and currently the Emmys of the Ministry of Education which is fed by the data from the schools as well as from the provincial departments because we are a provincial I mean we are a decentralized system with nine provincial education departments and ministries and our Emmys has four major components at the moment we have conducting we are conducting annual school sensors for decades which is supported by the department of sensors and statistics Sri Lanka which covers a good amount of data and also we have a student information system a teacher HRM human resource management system and a GIS database next yes the annual school sensors basically covers the students data by school and as well as the teachers data and the infrastructure facilities and the resources of schools so this is conducted once a year now it is due to first of September and they we collect data I mean we dispatch the papers sensors each of which is a huge you know several you know forms somewhat difficult for the schools to actually fill out within a short period of time even though we expect them to you know return these data sets as soon as possible but they are actually currently now we are practicing for the able schools to provide online data and other schools they collect the I mean they feel the forms and they share these with the zonal education officers which are around 100 under the provincial departments and they feed the data to the system and we are able to have the aggregated data at the national level and we have the student information system which is an adoption of the open emis UNESCO we have only adopted the core module of the open emis UNESCO actually it has a wide range of modules which which you know covers the students exam data assessment data even the the the health data we can incorporate into that system but we have not been able to you know have a wider spectrum of the open emis analysis these data for the student information system is entered or fed by the school classroom teachers in the country we have around 150,000 classrooms little more than that so we have to expect here that each class teacher would be really committed to this you know was submitting data of their children especially once a year we expect the whole data set uploaded and also when the students inward and might outward migrations are happen the teachers need to actually really want to that and change the data as appropriate and teacher HRM system this is mainly the purpose of this system is to help the administration teacher administration basically and this is a system generated customized program with like nine modules but we have been able to adopt only one or two modules maximum three modules out of this nine and these information are fed to the system by the zonal education officers around 1800 users are feeding data on daily basis and we have the GIS coordinates for many years we have been collecting this data and now we can plot these in Google earth maps and we can visualize the data if we in our needs two minutes left sorry yes next slide please yeah so this is the expected scenario we need to synchronize data systems and also letting the vertical and horizontal information sharing be given an analysis and ability to gather data to serve for quick data requirements and to support emergency situations like floods and landslides etc then and there happens and quick analytic responses to policy decision making and also simplified and user friendly information systems and also mobile phone or smartphone based data you know solutions and offline data uploading uh paper based information collection to be lessened and also widely used these data systems over the platforms for monitoring of education performance and incorporate the students related other data likes assessment data school based assessment data exam data and welfare provision regarding data and also the health insurance data is also always actually already incorporated but other data like immune systems immunity programs these things we need to incorporate it in the student's information system and also we need to we have as Dr. Mohd said we have quite a good you know state standard of technological infrastructure so we need to make use of them maximum at maximum level and also we expect to have a tech savvy education administrative system next slide please I'm sorry time is off yeah just one second yeah so we expect that the DHS2 will be helpful for us to create this you know to reach this expected scenario so we are heading on to that and also we expect that this will support a monitoring of SDG for requirements and we are working here very closely with the Ministry of Health with this regard so we hope that DHS2 will be supportive of us in improving the current situation thank you very much thank you so much our newest member of the community very very interesting story from Sri Lanka and while I'm changing the scene a little here to the next topic which is more the cross fertilization between the different sectors so there's several questions in the chat Sofia maybe you can read at least one and then I encourage people to either go to the COP or people to answer the questions in the chat okay well